Posted in: Preview, streaming, TV | Tagged: chris barrie, Craig Charles, danny john jules, Doug Naylor, Hattie Hayridge, Norman Lovett, red dwarf, Rob Grant

Red Dwarf: Danny "Cat" John-Jules Posts Instagram Pic Signaling Return

Red Dwarf star Danny John-Jules (Cat on the long-running sci-fi sitcom) posted a selfie on Instagram hinting at the series' upcoming return.

The return of Red Dwarf is getting much closer to becoming a reality now that series creators Rob Grant and Doug Naylor have resolved their rights dispute over the IP, and each will be relaunching different iterations of the series in different media. When Grant dropped out of the television series and opted to write spinoff novels, Taylor continued to produce and run the TV series after its sixth season on the BBC, continuing the show on British cable television with other writers.

On Sunday, regular cast member Danny John-Jules posted a selfie on his Instagram account that seemed to suggest the next production of the series is underway. "No words needed," he wrote, with a cat emoji at the end. The photo looks like it was taken at a cast and crew read-thru for the first rehearsal of the first new episode of Red Dwarf since 2020.

John-Jules' character on Red Dwarf is only called "Cat." He's a zoot suit-wearing, quaff-haired hepcat who literally has the DNA of a cat. He's a direct descendent of the series' main character Dave Lister's (Craig Charles) cat, who was kept on the ship when Lister went into suspended animation millions of years ago. By the time Lister woke up, the only other life sign on board was Cat's. Cat was endlessly chippy, never letting anything get him down even when he was stuck on a ship with a slacker, a snooty hologram of a long-dead officer, a neurotic robot, and a dour ship AI. John-Jules is the only member of the cast who appeared in every single episode of the show.

Red Dwarf is the longest-running British Science Fiction sitcom out there. Co-creators Grant and Naylor originally launched the series on the BBC in 1989, and it ran for six seasons all the way to 1993. It followed the misadventures of the eponymous ship and its crew millions of years in the future: slacker and last human alive Dave Lister (stand-up comedian Craig Charles), an AI hologram version of his uptight bunkmate Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie), an evolved humanoid Cat (Danny John-Jules), a neurotic robot named Kyrten (Robert Llewelyn) and the ship AI Holly (played alternately by Norman Lovett and Hattie Hayridge). The series continued on UK cable channel Dave in 2009 and ran for another four seasons, a miniseries and a special in 2020, though Grant had left to write tie-in novels while Naylor teamed with other writers to work on the TV series.

Somewhere along the line, Grant and Naylor started having a dispute over the rights to the IP, and they've finally sorted it out, so the two creators will be working separately to launch more Red Dwarf, and more books, TV series, a movie, video games, tabletop games, and other iterations are on the table.

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